The quantity and quality of terrorism

Abstract

This article presents a dataset of fatalities of domestic terrorism in Western European countries for the period 1965–2005. The Domestic Terrorism Victims (DTV) dataset, unlike others such as TWEED or GTD1, is based on local sources in each country and, consequently, it registers a higher number of killings. Measurement of the quantity of terrorism is therefore more accurate. The unit of observation is the fatality, not the attack, although the data can be transformed in terms of lethal attacks. Detailed information about each killing has been collected, making it possible to create new variables about the quality of violence: target selection, selectivity of the killings and their strategic aim. The ideology of the terrorists generates interesting variation in these three variables. The DTV is particularly suitable for hypothesis testing on the quantity and quality of terrorism.